Testimony of Mora McLean, President & CEO

The Africa-America Institute

before the

United States House of Representatives

Committee on Foreign Affairs

Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health

Hearing on

“Higher Education in Africa: Making the Link Between Intellectual Capital and Regional Development”

May 6, 2008

Chairman Payne, Congressman Smith and members of the sub-Committee, I want to thank you for this opportunity to testify before you today on a topic that has been at the core of The Africa-America Institute’s mission for the past 55 years.

I was asked to address five questions: (1) What is the state of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa; (2) What are the major challenges facing African colleges and universities; (3) What types of support should the international community provide African colleges and universities to enable them to provide higher quality education to a greater number of students; (4) Are there potential pitfalls to increasing aid to African colleges and universities; and (5) What benefits to the continent could U.S. support for the expansion and improvement of colleges and universities bring? 

This is a lot of territory to cover in these remarks, so in my oral presentation I will only to touch on each of them.

(1) What is the state of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa; and

(2) What are the major challenges facing African colleges and universities

It is rarely safe to generalize about Africa with its unsurpassed levels of complexity and degrees of diversity. This is especially so when it comes to the topic of human capacity building through education. Real conditions on the ground vary across and within sub-regions, countries, government bureaucracies, systems of education and individual education institutions.

There is, however, a general consensus that the overarching challenge confronting African higher education is inadequate capacity to meet demand—in terms of access and quality of the learning and output:

Over the last decade, the growth in the global demand for higher education has been spectacular, but especially in Africa where tertiary enrollment is growing at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. But in percentage and real terms the extent of African participation in tertiary education is still very low: The gross enrollment ratio for Africa is 5%, meaning that out of every 100 adults of tertiary age only five are enrolled in some sort of tertiary education program. This is as compared to gross enrollment ratios of 10% in South and West Asia and 69% in North America and Europe, respectively. (UNESCO Global Education Digest 2006)

African women face barriers that hamper their ability to progress from one educational level to another. The rate at which African women are enrolling in tertiary education programs is improving but is still hovers at only 40%.

The school life expectancy indicator, a measure that estimates the numbers of years of education a child can expect to receive at any given level (primary, secondary or tertiary), is especially useful because it facilitates comparisons across countries despite differences in their education systems. As you would expect, the tertiary school life expectancy in North America and Western Europe is higher than anywhere else in the world: it is three years, which is twice the global average. In East and Central Asia and the Pacific, the Arab States, Latin America and the Caribbean the average amount of time young people can expect to spend in tertiary education is about one year. But in sub-Saharan Africa (along with South and West Asia) young people spend an average 6 months or less in any kind of tertiary education. This situation has remained virtually stagnant since the early 1990s. (UNESCO Global Education Digest 2006)

Africa’s overall lack of capacity to meet higher education demand has contributed to the comparatively high rate at which students from the continent study abroad—three times the global average (an average outbound mobility ratio of 5.9%). This is but one dimension of what is referred to as the problem of “brain drain”—the emigration of Africa’s most talented. (UNESCO Global Education Digest 2006)

The outbound mobility ratio is one real indication of the overall poor condition of tertiary education in Africa. But it is arguable that, in the long run, this trend will not result in a net loss for Africa. I will return to the issue of brain drain at a later point in this presentation.

Other frequently cited indicators that African higher education is lagging behind the rest of the world include: the fact that public spending in real terms and as a share of education spending and per student has fallen sharply; high unemployment among existing tertiary graduates; weak university governance and campuses plagued by recurrent and disruptive tensions, between administrators, faculty and students; and inadequate and deteriorating infrastructure.

But in our encounters with education leaders in Africa, the most frequently cited cause of the inability to meet education demand is the lack of resources for teacher training and development. The professoriate in African universities—made up of the last generation of academics to be trained during earlier more favorable times—is aging, and the problems of recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced faculty and administrative staff are becoming increasingly severe.

These challenges facing higher education in African countries are not new—they have been building for the past decade during which higher education has been neglected by African governments—largely at the behest of international donors. This brings me to the third question:

(3) What types of support should the international community provide African colleges and universities to enable them to provide higher quality education to a greater number of students: 

The topic of this hearing was as relevant 50 years ago as it is today. There is a long and rich tradition of U.S. interest in and support for African higher education. Indeed, The Africa-America Institute (AAI) was established and became prominent during the early part of this history.

In 1952 Time Magazine reported a story about an Ethiopian university student in Kansas who had to travel 30 miles to get a haircut. Spurred by this account, and inspired by a collective desire to bolster the success of decolonization and the newly emerging independent nations on the African continent, a small multiracial group of Americans gathered in Washington DC to Institute of African-American Relations, the predecessor to AAI. AAI was part of a small vanguard of private organizations established by Americans to respond to the needs of foreign students, but was unique in its exclusive focus on Africa.

As one historian writes:

“During its early years AAI initiated and administered a range of educational programs in Africa, designed to provide secondary and technical as well as university training. Its conference series which, starting in 1968, brought together influential Africans and U.S. citizens annually, its bi-monthly publication, Africa Report, its cooperative efforts with educational leaders in public and private schools, and its program to facilitate travel to Africa, are examples of the scope, variety and diversity of these programs.” (Evelyn Jones Rich, 1978)

Education for Africans and about Africa has always been AAI’s focus.

We work with some 421 partner institutions worldwide including higher education and professional training institutions spread across five continents: Africa, Australia, Europe and in North and South America. Eighty five percent of AAI’s support comes from individual contributors, private foundations and companies that do business in Africa and the remaining 15 percent is overhead recoveries from small USAID contracts.

Before World War II churches and missionary bodies were the main sources of American support for African education at all levels. Official U.S. support for “educational and cultural exchange” broadly defined took off during the Cold War, and was influenced to some extent by earlier U.S. government initiatives targeted on Latin America.

In the late 50s, as Kenya was on the verge of political independence, a trade unionist named Thomas Joseph Mboya determined that the foundation for that east African nation’s political and economic freedom would have to be built by women and men equipped with the skills to fortify and manage a new nation. With support from a group called the African-American Student’s Foundation and a grant from the Kennedy family foundation, Mboya organized the East African Airlifts. Between 1959 and 1960, the Airlifts transported over 400 African students, mainly from Kenya, to enroll in university programs in the United States.

The Airlifts had a profound impact on the scope and direction of U.S.-government sponsored scholarship programs for African students over the next several decades. As the 1957 chair of the Africa sub-committee of the Senate foreign Relations Committee, and thereafter as president, John F. Kenney vigorously advocated for support of African students. Speaking in 1961 Kennedy said:

“There is no better way of helping new nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia than by assisting them to develop their human resources through education…”.

The aim of the Kennedy Administration was not simply to advance African development. Shortly after he took office in 1961, Kennedy supported the launching of the Southern African Student Program which he envisioned in part as essential to counter Soviet efforts to recruit the Angolan students who left Portugal at the beginning of the Angolan war of independence.

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State and the Agency for International Development were established as the two agencies chiefly responsible for funding the gradually increasing number of higher education programs for Africans.

These programs of support for African university and graduate students were administered by private organizations including AAI.

So it was that the United States government recognized and adopted education and cultural exchange as one of its most potent weapons in the ideological Cold War, as well as a critical means of advancing the development of market economies and democratic governance in developing countries, especially in Africa.

In the 1990s the end of the Cold War spurred renewed levels of US policy attention to Africa.

Through more than a decade and three successive White House Administrations, special efforts have been taken to increase Africa’s policy profile. Measures were introduced to promote trade and investment, ultimately culminating in the African Growth and Opportunity Act; a steady decline in U.S. economic assistance to the continent was reversed; an unprecedented high-level attention was showered on Africa, with two Presidents visiting and numerous Cabinet-level officials traveling there.

But despite renewed policy attention to Africa, the overall proportion of Africans involved in all U.S.-sponsored international exchanges and training (however defined) remains low, both in absolute terms and relative to participants in other parts of the world, and Africa’s own needs.

In fact USAID-sponsored international training programs for Africans have declined steadily and substantially over the past decade. African participant numbers fell by 75% from FY91 to FY00. Worldwide, USAID participant numbers fell 60% during the same period. The average duration of training also fell during this period, both worldwide and for Africa. USAID attributes the decline in its international training numbers to lower funding levels and a greater use of in-country training and training of trainers. USAID-sponsored academic training has almost entirely disappeared; participant numbers are down 85%, both worldwide and for the Africa region, reflecting in part a USAID strategic shift away from higher education and towards basic education.

While exchanges and training represent only one set of many foreign policy tools and resources, they are a particularly important means of U.S. engagement with Africa, given that Africa’s human resource needs, and the mutual benefits of increased U.S.-Africa relations, are so great. The availability of exchange and training opportunities for Africans has a great bearing on the effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid, and yet is addressed, if at all, on indirectly within most of existing development programs.

I turn now to the 4^th and 5^th questions:

(4) Are there potential pitfalls to increasing aid to African colleges and universities?

In their state of economic dependency African governments has been held to an exceptionally high standard as donors demand demonstration of a direct causal link between higher education investments and economic growth.

For policy makers and politicians within and outside Africa, quantitative measures have special appeal because they provide a simple way of demonstrating progress to meet the high expectations of donor governments and their taxpaying citizens. But this is problematic because, as the authors of a recent Center for Global Development Working Paper on the topic observe:

“Researchers have found it exceedingly difficult to get a good grip on two critical output measures—how to measure quality in higher education and how to determine the value added by higher education over and beyond the student’s innate abilities.”

They go on, however, to conclude that “reducing the benefits of tertiary education simply to measurable economic payoffs would appear to be a rather impoverished vision.”

I heartily agree, and offer this quote from one AAI alumna, a South African university professor, to illustrate the point. She says:

"Education is now widely acknowledged as the…resource needed…to expand our knowledge base and to discover the new, to exercise our intellectual capacity, to extract meaning [from] our world, expand our social and intellectual horizon, to gain insight, skills and knowledge which in turn can add value to our natural surroundings."

"The educational opportunity provided to me by AAI empowered me with most if not all of these beneficial factors. But most importantly, education coupled with international experience liberated me from the inferiority complex baggage which I carried for years as a South African black woman."

Although it is frequently cited as a pitfall of choosing to support higher education for development, the absence of hard empirical proof of the social returns to tertiary education is offset by other data. In countries across the world the presence of strong higher education systems correlates with positive indices of development including greater technological advancement, political stability and social cohesion, and relatively high rates of successful entrepreneurship.

Support for African tertiary institutions that includes short and long-term scholarships for faculty and administrators to study abroad is often associated with another pitfall: the infamous brain drain. In the earlier section I cited the comparatively high rate at which Africans seek advanced academic and training opportunities outside of the Continent.

But contrary to the conventional wisdom, providing Africans with opportunities to study abroad does not inevitably lead to a permanent loss of talent from the Continent. Assuming otherwise obscures variations in the international flow of human capital, and it applies a double standard. The subtext of otherwise legitimate concerns about “brain drain”—the emigration of trained professionals—from Africa often seems to be that Africans should be discouraged, if not prevented from doing what other talented and ambitious people around the world have done from time immemorial, which is to seek to expand their horizons.

The intellectual frame of reference for Africans as for other intellectually curious people around the world is international as well as local.

In fact, analyses of human capital flows reveal that although people may leave home, they don't necessarily do so permanently; and even when they do maintain permanent residence abroad, they are likely to contribute to improving conditions back home in significant ways. (Center for Global Development)

The validity of this research is borne out by our experience at The Africa-America Institute. AAI alumni—Africans who have benefited from AAI education programs—are high performers in academics and in their professions, and return to their home countries at the rate of 90 percent and higher. A 2004 impact assessment commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that its “multi-million dollar investment in long-term training [through AFGRAD and ATLAS] for over 40 years produced significant and sustained changes that furthered African development in measurable ways.” This assessment evaluated the results of programs that were managed by AAI, and that involved selection, placement, orientation monitoring and follow-on activities for Africans from 52 African countries. The study found, among other things, that “brain drain” was contained—not worsened—by the major contributions participants made in their home country institutions and sectors that multiplied opportunities, improved the learning environment, and raised hopes for young, upcoming professionals.” (See Generations of Quiet Progress: The Development Impact of U.S. Long-Term University Training on Africa from 1963 to 2003

In our experience spanning 55 years, the greatest potential pitfalls of increasing aid for African higher education derive from the economic dependency of African governments and education institutions, and their unequal bargaining power vis a vis the U.S. government and U.S. higher education institutions. This resource and power imbalance increases the odds that programs will not accurately reflect African priorities (for example, ones that focus exclusively on industrial training or particular sectors deemed to coincide with economic growth and exclude the liberal arts); will incorporate inappropriate U.S. models ( for example, adoption of teacher training techniques from the United States, notwithstanding the wide variations in quality and deficiencies in our own state-run systems); or will disproportionately serve U.S.-based rather than African interests (for example where a U.S. higher education institution’s research objectives and desire to establish its international credentials overshadows an African institutions need for faculty and curriculum development in the subject area).

Our experience is that the question of what ought to be the substantive field or sectoral focus has been particularly prone to disagreement and tension among and between U.S. government agency sponsors, African donor recipients and U.S. higher education institutions. USAID has tended to be most concerned with training and skills deemed to be directly relevant to economic development, and less interested in providing support to, for example, research and scholarship in the arts and social sciences.

But we should recall, for example, that it was African intellectuals and scholars who, having analyzed and understood the problem of the state, introduced the concept of governance –that is the need to focus on state society relations and the accountability of African governments to their nations’ citizens—into the lexicon of the World Bank and development circles generally. This is one among many significant intellectual contributions that African social scientists have made to the development discourse and practice, in spite of rather than in collaboration with Western sponsors and technical assistance providers.

(5) What benefits to the continent could U.S. support for the expansion and improvement of colleges and universities bring?

This fifth and final question is a good place to conclude because it directs our attention to future possibilities. There is not a single development challenge facing Africa—whether it involves illiteracy, lack of access to quality education, the need to increase agricultural production, environmental degradation, conflict, HIV/AIDS, or underdeveloped private markets—that does not cry out for some form of capacity-building.

Almost six decades of official U.S. support for tertiary education for Africans have yielded important lessons. I would like to call your attention to two lessons that, if heeded, can result in substantial benefits flowing in multiple directions:

The lessons are that: 1) Higher education is not the enemy of basic education, and is essential for quality education overall; and 2) Long-term degree training is a high-yield investment for the United States as well as for Africa.

Lesson # 1 - Higher education is not the enemy of basic education, and is essential for quality overall:

The misconception—that higher education can only be strengthened at the expense of basic education—is the unintended consequence of cost-benefit analyses that have led donors and African governments to choose one over the other, rather than address the problems of education systems holistically.

This has led to overemphasis on educational access and attainment—a tendency to measure results in terms of the number of children in school and the amount of schooling they acquire, rather than in terms of student performance and quality of output. But as we have seen, sacrificing quality education for quantity is counterproductive, and often leads to other problems.

I recently received a letter from one senior African government official who laments that his country:

“has a serious backlog, dating back to the colonial era, in terms of human resource development. The Government…has expended substantial resources, about 30 percent of [the] national budget since independence, to address this situation. The efforts of Government and other stakeholders notwithstanding, the education sector continues to experience serious problems as evidenced by low pass rate in secondary schools and other indicators.’

This experience is widespread across the African continent, with under-resourced systems struggling to respond to increasing student enrollments and with high drop-out rates.

Lessons learned from the undue attention to quantity also helped to transform the United Nations-inspired Education for All (EFA) movement from a global commitment to simply provide primary education for all children and reduce adult illiteracy, to one explicitly aimed at achieving quality basic education for all by 2015.

Moreover, a key ingredient of quality education is quality teaching, which in turn is a function of advanced training for teachers and school administrators. The practical reality is that higher education is the highest leveraging point for strengthening performance all along the education pipeline.

Lesson # 2 - Long-term degree training is a high-yield investment that yields reciprocal benefits for the United States as well as African countries:

We at AAI would strongly urge the adoption programs that entail a mix of interventions, including scholarships for individuals to study in the United States or elsewhere. Institutions are only as efficient and capable as the individuals responsible for operating and maintaining them.

Our ongoing experience with operating the Namibian Government Scholarship Training Program and the Ford Foundation-sponsored International Fellowship Program has been equally positive. The Africans students who qualify for the graduate degree scholarships provided under these programs take advantage of opportunities to study in Europe and North and South America as well as Africa, and they do well and return home eager and able to make significant contributions to the development of their home countries—and to help solve global problems.

Lastly, all to often we here in the United States fail to appreciate the benefits that we stand to gain from engaging intellectually with Africans. Few American educators would disagree that the depth and quality of intellectual inquiry and depth and diversity of social interaction on American university campuses is greatly enriched by the presence and involvement of foreign faculty and students.

The greatest problems facing the globe exist in parts of the world, including Africa, that possess the lowest levels of capacity in terms of the skills and resources needed to address these problems. For U.S. higher education institutions to maintain their global competitive edge in preparing young Americans for work and life in the age of globalization, they need greater exposure to Africa’s realities and African thinkers.

Mr. Chairman and Congressman Smith I want to congratulate you on this bi-partisan exploration of a set of issues with far-reaching implications for African development, U.S.-Africa relations and global education. Again, I thank you for the invitation to testify.